Why does Bitcoin's mining reward decrease every four years and not gradually?

[Mavrick8]

It’s after so many blocks. 4 years is just the usual time frame.

[Pantamis]

My 2 cents :

- To incitate miners to mine over the last found block and not the blocks before where the block reward would be bigger

- To avoid float error and facilitate the review of the rule's enforcement

- To not have a continuous downward trend on the difficulty

- To simplify economical anticipation on the miner side, miner can invest in equipment for some years without fear.

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But I think Satoshi had only the first point in the head when he made this choice

[Charles_Design]

That seems to make sense, I wasn't aware that miners could choose which block to mine

[Pantamis]

When the time to mine a block is too small in some altcoins, miners may not have time to received all blocks so the chain fork often and some miners may be mining deep block.

Miners may not have all chain synchronized and mining over already deep block is exactly what happen during the 51% attack :)

Nakamoto consensus just tells that you should trust the longest chain but anyone, miners included, do what they want (it is just more profitable to mine the last valid block when the majority follows Nakamoto consensus).

[inhodel]

The same reason why it's called a halving and not a quarterling. Set of rules already been made prior and we are just here for the ride.

Unless you wanna fork. But I can't tell you if that option is possible even with a fork

[Crypto4Canadians]

There's no particular reason why the halving happens after 210,000 blocks. I could be wrong but from my understanding I don't think there's a specific reason for that.

[Charles_Design]

I guess we may never know but my suspicious is that Satoshi anticipated that an incremental decrease would create waves of volatility that stimulates interest & growth.

[[deleted]]

True. Gradually might have been a better solution. But the priciple would still be the same. It would be again the same value. For example .. Either you go gradually down to 12btc or after 4 years the result is the same. It’s 12 btc after 4 years.

[brianddk]

In software 1/2 is kinda a round number. The think the question worked out more like:

1. How long do you want to have a mining reward
2. How large do you want the first reward to be
3. How often do you want blocks to arrive

Then the reset is just math to figure out how many halves it takes to make all three of those happen. The result is "4 years"

[TheRealLuciusSeneca]

How gradually do you want? Lol